BIS Lightweight Application Development Engine

JSP Taglib Quick Start

Introduction

This is a quickstart guide for the JSP Taglib version of blade. It helps to have some familiarity with blade (see the documentation that comes with the XSL version). The taglib version comes in two formats:

An example WAR file for evaluation
A patch to the bladeui-v0.5.2 package which allows you to compile themes for the taglib version.

Example WAR File

The sample war has the following basic directory structure:

bladeui/
 blade/
 WEB-INF/
  blade.tld
  blade-components-core.tld
  blade-components-ie6.tld
  web.xml
  lib/
   bladeui.jar
  blade/

The blade directory holds a stripped down version of blade-v0.5.2 (only js, css, and images only). WEB-INF/blade.tld is the descriptor for generic blade tags in the head/meta section of the XSL version. WEB-INF/blade-components-*.tld both support a partial set of the core blade widgets (checkstrip, slider, and spin not included). The only difference is that ie6 implements tabstrips and rollovers differently in an attempt to ease some of the problems associated with a bug in versions of ie6 on windows xp. When this bug is present, the browser constantly re-loads CSS background images from the server instead of using its cache. Every mouseover on a rollover or click of a tabstrip can result in 30 or more requests back to the server, and eventually the browser hangs. Lib/bladeui.jar holds the classes implementing the tag library. WEB-INF/blade holds themes' -img.properties files, which mirror the -img.xml files in the XSL version.

Patch

The patch file has the following structure:

bladeui-patch/
 tools/
  xml2properties.xsl
  expstyle.bat
 components/
  core/
   IE6Tabstrip.js
 ant/
  build.xml
 doc/
  taglib-quickstart.html

Copy the contents of the tools folder into the tools folder in bladeui-v0.5.2 in order to compile themes for the jsp taglib version. The IE6Tabstrip.js file should be added to the components/core folder of your blade distribution if you want to use the IE6 compatibility-mode tabstrip. When it comes time to build your web app, you will want to copy the js and css files from blade into one folder, and the theme -img.properties files into WEB-INF/blade. Build.xml is not a complete ANT file, but it provides some code to help do this.

Also, please note that the primary purpose of this file is to provide a patch to bladeui-v0.5.2. You still need to download the example war file to get bladeui.jar and the .tld files.